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REVIEW: Plantera

Plantera is a cute take on the clicker genre, a genre which is already gone beyond over populated with most of them being free to play. What does Plantera do to set itself apart from its competition, let’s find out.

Status: Released

Developer: VaragtP

Publisher: VaragtP

Genre: Garden builder

Release Date: 28 Jan, 2016

Gameplay:

Plantera starts out by giving you an empty garden with the purpose of making it bloom. You click onto flying butterflies and bash moles to get the initial coins needed to plant your first carrot plants. From here, you have a little blue helper who helps out by pulling them out and picking them up. As a general clicker game, from there you start unlocking different trees, bushes, farm animals and special items by collecting coins. I was surprised at the speed at which these items unlock. Since it’s a paid game and not a free to play title, there is less grinding here than say games like Adventure Capitalist or Clicker Heroes. There are various critters who annoy who throughout the game like magpies who steal fruits fallen down from trees, dogs who scares away your animals and stuff like that. You can counter them by placing various special items like scarecrows and pets of your own to scare away these critters. You unlock more helpers when you expand your garden which slowly eliminates the need to click. This pace also makes feel you a little useless later on as you see the coins being gathered up faster than they drop. There are huge price spikes on more expensive trees, bushes, animals etc as you place a few. Unlocking more garden area also helps in increasing the limit of the amount of things you can place in your garden. In middle of the game, you will see loot hero and ladybugs coming in sometimes who give lots of coins when clicked on. In latter game, your only job seems to be limited to look out for these as clicking doesn’t seem as helpful as it would in other games of the genre.

In a normal clicker game, the time you spent away from the game also made you money for the time you were gone. While this is implemented here, it is applied in a different way. There is a limited time for which your workers will work after you’ve closed the game which can be upgraded slowly. You can also double the coins you receive every time with one of these special upgrades. Being a clicker game, there is a certain level of grind which slowly settles in with the huge price spikes. But, the time taken to unlock everything is surprisingly quite low. What disappointed me was the lack of options of the plants themselves, with 4 of each type running out of steam far early.

Visuals:

Plantera is a cute game. From your little helpers to the critters that invade, it is an eye popping game with colours raining down. Plantera keeps its cutesy touch down to the facial expressions. When a magpie steals your fruit, it looks so happy that you just want to let it take the fruit. When you come back to the game after sometime and all your helpers and pets are asleep, they look so peaceful that you do not want to wake them up. In the start of the game, it is just a empty palette, but as you progress through the game, there is so much going on the screen that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. The butterflies which give you coins have a golden glow on outside which helps them distinguish them from normal butterflies and so on. All the plants, trees and bushes have less variety but are distinguishable from each other, especially the cherry tree which when planted throughout the garden, gives a sense of bloom like no other. Overall, Plantera is a very cute and relaxing game to look at.

Soundtrack:

Plantera has a very soothing soundtrack loop. This keeps you in the game as you watch the animals go about their duties and listen to the music. It really mends in with the graphical design of the game and helps create a very good environment. Rest of the sounds are fairly generic with coin drops, dog barks and magpies chirping pretty fairly done. Later on in the game though, these sounds overwhelm you as you hear your pets scaring away the critters, coins getting picked up and so on. This almost drowns out the background score which is nothing short of stellar.

Verdict:

If you like clicker games, you will like plantera. It runs well on even the oldest of PC’s and there are no obvious bugs present. It is marred by the usual grindy tropes of the genre but it handles it surprisingly well and does an excellent job of keeping you hooked. It does not overstay its welcome and gives away everything it has to offer in a short period of time. Its graphical cuteness combined with the very good soundtrack makes it easy on eyes and ears. If you are tired of clicker games, Plantera might not change your mind much, but on 3$, it is worth a try